Over a year ago, werk bought a raft of HP kit, for which we duely sent off our Carepak registrations (at the time, the online thingy wasn't working). Last week, a printer gave up the ghost, so I called HP for support. After about 40 minutes of prodding and pulling the printer we started to talk about an engineer visit. Trouble was, our Carepak "wasn't registered", so the fun started...
So here we are a week later, with still no printer. A colleague of mine had been calling, leaving messages and had even managed to register the Carepak! Still no engineer entitlement though.
I called this morning, and after a bit of passing around, found out that in fact, none of our kit has had it's registration sorted out in HP. Great. I did manage to get our poorly printer registered (and an engineer dispatched) though.
So in the end, we've had downtime of over a week all because HP don't process their Carepak registrations (and don't send confirmations either). I think this is all really down to service - although the woman I spoke to today was very helpful, she'd have been a whole lot more helpful if she'd got it registered in the first place (I'm not sure she was anything to do with our original mis-registrations, but you get the idea, right?). Why should we customers have to sort out HP's problems, eh?
The moral of the story: If you've got HP kit and Carepaks, then phone HP and check they're registered. If not, the service desk can give you numbers of people to call to get the job done.